Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. –William Pitt

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Daily Archives: June 7, 2011

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North Carolina is having a budget crisis so the teacher of a third grade class assigns the kids the task of writing to their legislators, one of the 3rd graders Dad happens to be one of those legislators so the child writes the letter to the Dad begging him not only to not cut education funding but to increase it. Dad is angry!

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A top gun control group has filed suit against a recently passed Florida law restricting doctors from asking patients about whether they own firearms, claiming the policy tramples on First Amendment rights.

The first-in-the-nation law, signed last week by Gov. Rick Scott, would prohibit doctors from recording information about whether a patient owns a gun. It also restricts them from asking about whether patients own a gun unless that information is relevant to their medical care.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, along with another law firm and groups representing doctors, filed suit Monday asking a U.S. District Court judge in Florida to strike down the law.

The suit, which disparagingly refers to the policy as the “physician gag law,” complained that it was too vague and too strict and could lead doctors to “self-censor” — to the detriment of their patients.

“By severely restricting such speech and the ability of physicians to practice such preventative medicine, the Florida statute could result in grievous harm to children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly,” the suit said.

But Scott’s office defended the law, noting that it only bars doctors from inquiring about firearms if that information is not relevant to a patients’ care or the safety of others.

“The law ensures respect for a patient’s right to own or possess a firearm and protects them from potential discrimination and harassment in cases where it is not relevant to the patient’s medical care or safety, or the safety of anyone else in the home,” spokesman Lane Wright said in an email.

Backers of the law, including author Rep. Jason Brodeur, claimed they were trying to prevent doctors from invading personal privacy. The law was spawned after a Florida pediatrician told a mother to seek another doctor after she refused to answer questions about firearms in her home.

Sponsors also expressed concern that medical records reflecting information about firearms could be shared with insurance companies, potentially leading to higher rates. Indeed, the law includes a provision barring insurance companies from raising premiums or denying coverage based on whether an applicant owns a gun.

But the American Academy of Pediatrics, a party to the suit, claimed the law would do harm because pediatricians should be able to provide “anticipatory guidance” to prevent injury to children.

The Brady Center said doctors should be urging parents to keep firearms under lock and key, and away from kids.

“This gun lobby-backed gag law is a clear violation of the First Amendment rights of doctors and patients to discuss the severe risks posed by guns in the home, particularly to children,” Brady Center President Paul Helmke said in a statement.

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Update at 7:34 p.m. ET: USA TODAY’s Oren Dorell reports that the search warrant is expected to arrive about 8 p.m. ET and that deputies will begin searching then.

“The details provided to us indicated there may have been a violent crime scene here,” Capt. Rex Evans said.

Sheriff’s deputies also observed signs of possible violence, Evans said, though he would not elaborate, saying he is not at liberty to discuss factors that led deputies to request the search warrant.

“At this time no bodies have been observed, recovered or identified,” he said. “There have been no bodies observed at the scene.”

Update at 7:27 p.m. ET: At a news conference earlier, Liberty County Sheriff’s Capt. Rex Evans said that so far, authorities have “no evidence of deceased persons.”

“We have found some circumstances that have raised some questions and we have requested a search warrant. As soon as that warrant arrives here at the scene, we will further our investigation,” he said, KPRC-TV says.

Liberty County sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Rex Evans said that as of 6 p.m. CT (7 p.m. ET), officers had not exhumed any bodies, the Houston Chronicle reports.

“At this time we have not recovered any bodies,” he said. “We only received information of a possible crime scene here at this location. Upon our arrival we determined that there was a need for a search warrant. Once that warrant arrives at the scene we will further our investigation.”

The paper also spoke to the property owner, identified as Joe Bankson, who was reached in Dallas while traveling with his wife.

“I haven’t killed anybody,” he said. “And I have a lot of friends, but I haven’t helped anybody bury any bodies.”

Update at 6:45 p.m. ET: Liberty County sheriff’s officials said they found blood on the property. The Houston Chronicle is reporting that the tip came from a psychic. Here’s what a state law enforcement source told the paper:

“All we know is the sheriff department received a call about a mass grave, or something like that, with several bodies,” the source said. “They went and checked it, and there was nothing there. The caller went back and said, ‘No, you went to the wrong house.’

“They go back out and go to the house and see something dark that could have been blood, and do a persumpting test that [it] was human blood.”

The FBI is participating in the search.

Update at 6:34 p.m. ET: Authorities have brought in cadaver dogs to search a property in Hardin, The Cleveland Advocate reports. They acted after receiving a tip about bodies and a possible mass grave.

The property is at the intersection of County Roads 2049 and 2048 between Hardin and Daisetta, about 50 miles northeast of Houston.

Liberty County sheriff’s spokesman Rex Evans said that as of 6 p.m. CT (7 p.m. ET), officers had not exhumed any bodies, the Houston Chronicle reports.

“At this time we have not recovered any bodies,” he said. “We only received information of a possible crime scene here at this location. Upon our arrival we determined that there was a need for a search warrant. Once that warrant arrives at the scene we will further our investigation.”

The paper also spoke to the property owner, identified as Joe Bankson, who was reached in Dallas while traveling with his wife.

“I haven’t killed anybody,” he said. “And I have a lot of friends, but I haven’t helped anybody bury any bodies.”

Update at 6:45 p.m. ET: Liberty County sheriff’s officials said they found blood on the property. The Houston Chronicle is reporting that the tip came from a psychic. Here’s what a state law enforcement source told the paper:

“All we know is the sheriff department received a call about a mass grave, or something like that, with several bodies,” the source said. “They went and checked it, and there was nothing there. The caller went back and said, ‘No, you went to the wrong house.’

“They go back out and go to the house and see something dark that could have been blood, and do a persumpting test that [it] was human blood.”

The FBI is participating in the search.

Update at 6:34 p.m. ET: Authorities have brought in cadaver dogs to search a property in Hardin, The Cleveland Advocate reports. They acted after receiving a tip about bodies and a possible mass grave.

The property is at the intersection of County Roads 2049 and 2048 between Hardin and Daisetta, about 50 miles northeast of Houston.

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The lights have been permanently shut off at the last major U.S. incandescent light bulb plant, General Electric‘s Winchester, Va., facility. But don’t worry. GE’s Chinese plants will replace them with a different kind that is supposed to be better.

Anyway, we really won’t have any choice. Thanks to pressure from environmental activist groups, a 2007 law passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush will make the sale of standard incandescent 100-watt bulbs illegal effective January 1, 2012, 75-watt bulbs on Jan. 1, 2013, and 60- and 40-watt bulbs as of Jan. 1, 2014. This was because they can’t meet new government-imposed “efficiency standards.” Chief sponsors were Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and Fred Upton (R-MI). Rep. Upton, now Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has since offered to hold a new hearing to consider removing the ban. He hasn’t promised to repeal it, but maybe he’ll finally see the light.

So that currently leaves us with two alternatives. It’s to either use expensive compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) that contain toxic mercury, or even much pricier light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs that don’t, but which produce even poorer illumination color quality.

Proponents argue that CFL lamps contain only very small amounts of mercury. Great! But then why are special clean-up instructions, room ventilating precautions and disposal requirements needed in case we happen to break a bulb? And what prevents soil and surface water contamination from countless units that ultimately wind up in landfills?

John Skinner, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, expressed serious concerns regarding CFL dangers to workers who handle trash and recycling. In a National Public Radio interview he explained “The problem with the bulbs is that they’ll break before they get to the landfill. They’ll break in containers, or they’ll break in the trucks. Workers may be exposed to very high levels of mercury when that happens.”

Although some states and counties have outlawed putting CFL bulbs in the trash, it remains questionable how many people will comply with that prohibition. Pete Keller, a spokesman for Eco Lights Northwest, a Washington state company that recycles fluorescent lamps, believes that “… most people do want to recycle, but if it’s not made easy, it doesn’t happen. And they’re [CFLs] small enough to fit in a trash can. So by nature, I think most people are not recyclers. So if it’s small enough to fit in a trash can, that’s where it ends up.”

Here’s where the whole matter get’s particularly confusing. On one hand, politicians who legislated the incandescent bulb ban virtually mandating use of CFL don’t appear to regard mercury to be a big deal. At the same time, the EPA now plans to regulate mercury emissions from coal plants that provide the electricity to power half of those lights.

They seem to believe we can replace those dirty coal plants with solar and wind power. But there’s a small issue here also. This might be quite inconvenient for people who mostly use lights at night…or who are just too impatient to wait for friendly breezes to blow.

Then again, they say that those CFLs are more efficient…that they’re supposed to use less electricity and last longer. That sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? But will CFL really reduce power use? In 1987 the town of Traer, Iowa distributed 18,000 free bulbs to its residents in a demonstration project to get the answer. The results showed that residential electricity use actually rose by 8% because people tended to use more lights and keep them on longer believing that the lighting was cheaper.

Do those CFL lamps truly last longer? Well, apparently that depends on how long you leave them on. If you turn them on and off frequently they reportedly burn out quite fast. (Actually, wasn’t that “turning off when not in use” concept originally thought to be a good power conservation idea?) They also don’t last long in a “hot” environment where there isn’t much airflow around a lamp, such as in a recessed fixture or downlight can.

Michael Siminovitch, who directs the California Lighting Center at the University of California, Davis, likes CFLs. Yet he admitted to the New York Times that “In pursuit of the holy grail, we stepped on the consumers.” He confessed that they are “not lasting quite as long as consumers have been led to believe.”

And what about lighting quality? Well, take color, for example. Imagine that you care about distinguishing between brown and purple so that you don’t pick a bad necktie and your socks match? Well that might be a small problem with CFL. On the other hand, no one will be likely to notice unless you go outside during daylight…and their mismatched outfits will probably look just as dumb. A guide produced by lightbulb researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute declares that CFL bulbs fall so short of the needed color rendering index (CRI) of 85 to 90 that most manufacturers don’t even list this poor rating information on their packages.

CFL packaging information often overstates the amount of light the lamps put out compared with supposedly equivalent incandescent bulbs. They typically require one-third of the wattage to replace them, rather than only the one-fourth advertised. And unlike those old obsolete relics, you will need to wait for a couple of minutes or so for your modern, improved CFL to reach full brightness. Consider also that some types don’t work with dimmer switches, just in case you might wish for some silly reason to adjust an illumination level to read or doze. But since they tend to automatically become dimmer over time, you can patiently wait for that to happen, and rest later.

Does any of this maybe cause you to wonder why, if CFLs are that good, government needs to pass a law that requires us to buy them… and to prohibit future sales of a safer type that lots of us continue to prefer? We have to assume that those smart legislators that came up with this law have some really good reasons, right? After all, we voted for the majority of them…or at least some people must have.

Could it be a clever strategy intended to have us purchase and stockpile the old bulbs as a way to boost the economy? Probably not. The problem with that theory is that if our government doesn’t let American companies sell the kind of products we want it, that won’t help our economy or create jobs. Not even “green” jobs.

Take GE’s Winchester plant closing for example. Rather than changing over to CFL production, which is much more labor-intensive, 200 U.S. job positions went to China where employees are paid much less. Pat Doyle, who had worked at the plant for 26 years, told the Washington Post, “We’ve been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.”

GE has been increasingly shipping jobs overseas. At the end of 2000 more than half of its employee workforce (54%) was located in the U.S. By 2010 U.S. workers comprised 44% of the total, with foreign business providing $9 billion of their total $14.2 billion profits. Yet last year they not only avoided paying any U.S. taxes, but actually received a $3.2 billion tax benefit…this after receiving $16 billion in 2008 Federal Reserve bailouts along with hundreds of millions more in green energy business subsidies. Given those remarkable financial achievements, there should be little wonder that GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, would be selected to chair a new Obama administration Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

And while it’s admittedly only a hunch, this leads to another theory. Maybe the CFL initiative is being launched as part of a broader “Jobs for Loans” exchange with China. Wouldn’t this be a logical follow-up to its previous clunker program?

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Op/Ed

It may not come as surprising news to many of you that the United Nations doesn’t approve of our Second Amendment. Not one bit. And they very much hope to do something about it with help from some powerful American friends. Under the guise of a proposed global “Small Arms Treaty” premised to fight “terrorism”, “insurgency” and “international crime syndicates” you can be quite certain that an even more insidious threat is being targeted – our Constitutional right for law-abiding citizens to own and bear arms.

What, exactly, does the intended agreement entail?

While the terms have yet to be made public, if passed by the U.N. and ratified by our Senate, it will almost certainly force the U.S. to:

Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms (exempting those owned by our government of course).

Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons (any that have magazines even though they still operate in the same one trigger pull – one single “bang” manner as revolvers, a simple fact the ant-gun media never seem to grasp).

Create an international gun registry, clearly setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.

In short, overriding our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.

Have no doubt that this plan is very real, with strong Obama administration support. In January 2010 the U.S. joined 152 other countries in endorsing a U.N. Arms Treaty Resolution that will establish a 2012 conference to draft a blueprint for enactment. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pledged to push for Senate ratification.

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton has cautioned gun owners to take this initiative seriously, stating that the U.N. “is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there is no doubt that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control.”

Although professing to support the Second Amendment during her presidential election bid, Hillary Clinton is not generally known as a gun rights enthusiast. She has been a long-time activist for federal firearms licensing and registration, and a vigorous opponent of state Right-to-Carry laws. As a New York senator she ranked among the National Rifle Association’s worst “F”-rated gun banners who voted to support the sort of gunpoint disarmament that marked New Orleans’ rogue police actions against law-abiding gun owners in the anarchistic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

President Obama’s record on citizen gun rights doesn’t reflect much advocacy either. Consider for example his appointment of anti-gun rights former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels as an alternate U.S. representative to the U.N., and his choice of Andrew Traver who has worked to terminate civilian ownership of so-called “assault rifles” (another prejudicially meaningless gun term) to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Then, in a move unprecedented in American history, the Obama administration quietly banned the re-importation and sale of 850,000 collectable antique U.S.-manufactured M1 Garand and Carbine rifles that were left in South Korea following the Korean War. Developed in the 1930s, the venerable M1 Garand carried the U.S. through World War II, seeing action in every major battle.

As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama was an aggressive advocate for expanding gun control laws, and even voted against legislation giving gun owners an affirmative defense when they use firearms to defend themselves and their families against home invaders and burglars. He also served on a 10-member board of directors of the radically activist anti-gun Joyce Foundation in Chicago during a period between 1998-2001when it contributed $18,326,183 in grants to anti-Second Amendment organizations.

If someone breaks into your home when you are there, which would you prefer to have close at hand: 1) a telephone to call 911, or 2) a loaded gun of respectable caliber? That’s a pretty easy question for me to answer. I am a long-time NRA member, concealed firearms license holder and a regular weekly recreational pistol shooter. And while I don’t ordinarily care to target anything that has a mother, will reluctantly make an exception should an urgent provocation arise. I also happen to enjoy the company of friends who hunt, as well as those, like myself, who share an abiding interest in American history and the firearms that influenced it.

There are many like me, and fewer of them would be alive today were it not for exercise of their gun rights. In fact law-abiding citizens in America used guns in self-defense 2.5 million times during 1993 (about 6,850 times per day), and actually shot and killed 2 1/2 times as many criminals as police did (1,527 to 606). Those civilian self-defense shootings resulted in less than 1/5th as many incidents as police where an innocent person was mistakenly identified as a criminal (2% versus 11%).

Just how effectively have gun bans worked to make citizens safer in other countries? Take the number of home break-ins while residents are present as an indication. In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, nearly half of all burglaries occur when residents are present. But in the U.S. where many households are armed, only about 13% happen when someone is home.

Recognizing clear statistical benefit evidence, 41 states now allow competent, law-abiding adults to carry permitted or permit-exempt concealed handguns. As a result, crime rates in those states have typically fallen at least 10% in the year following enactment.

So the majority in our Senate is smart enough to realize that the U.N.’s gun-grab agenda is unconstitutional, politically suicidal for those who support it, and down-right idiotic—right? Let’s hope so, but not entirely count on it. While a few loyal Obama Democrats are truly “pro-gun”, many are loathe to vote against treaties that carry the president’s international prestige, causing him embarrassment.

Also, don’t forget that Senate confirmation of anti-gun Obama nominee Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Many within the few who voted against her did so only because of massive grassroots pressure from constituents who take their Constitutional protections very seriously.

Now, more than ever, it’s imperative to stick by our guns in demanding that all Constitutional rights be preserved. If not, we will surely lose both.

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At some point during the first two years of his administration, President Obama stopped receiving the daily economic briefing that he requested when he took office.

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs announced at his own first daily briefing reporters that Obama asked for the daily economic briefing, described then as comparable to the daily intelligence briefing the president gets every morning.

“The president asked that this be added every day to his schedule,” Gibbs said at the time. Gibbs added that Obama believed it is “important that each day he receive the most up to date information as it relates to the economy.”

But at some point, the daily economic briefings stopped showing up on Obama’s daily schedule.

White House officials said the meetings slowly petered out, but Obama still receives a daily economic briefing on paper.

“The president requests regular meetings several times a week and daily updates from his economic policy team, just as he does with his national security team and other senior advisers in the White House,” one administration official said.

Additionally, the official said, the president gets daily briefing documents from his National Economic Council and regular updates from Vice President Biden.

White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said the president receives updates and briefings on the economy in a number of ways.

Brundage said in an email that “the president routinely meets with members of his economic team, both on an individual basis and in groups, and receives updates from his economic staff from their daily staff meeting.”

“In addition, he receives daily briefing documents from the National Economic Council and gets regular updates from the vice president on a series of issues, including the ongoing deficit negotiations,” Brundage said. “The president also requests meetings with outside economists and experts.”

When Obama entered office, the economy was shedding as many as 600,000 jobs a month and the nation was in the midst of a deep recession.

Since then, the economy has recovered to a degree, though it remains a huge political issue and is seen as the big topic for the 2012 presidential race.

The national unemployment rate for May was 9.1 percent, and while the sum of 54,000 jobs added was far less than the administration had hoped, it did bring the streak of months with positive job growth to 15.